Elizabeth Gaskell

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Standard Name: Gaskell, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson
Nickname: Lily
Married Name: Elizabeth Gaskell
Indexed Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Pseudonym: Cotton Mather Mills
Pseudonym: The Author of Mary Barton etc.
Self-constructed Name: E. C. Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell , one of the foremost fiction-writers of the mid-Victorian period, produced a corpus of seven novels, numerous short stories, and a controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë . She wrote extensively for periodicals, as well as producing novels directly for the book market, often on issues of burning interest: her industrial novels appeared in the midst of fierce debate over class relations, factory conditions and legislation; Ruth took a fallen woman and mother as its protagonist just as middle-class feminist critique of gender roles emerged. Gaskell occupies a bridging position between Harriet Martineau and George Eliot in the development of the domestic novel.
Photograph of a well-known head-and shoulders drawing of Elizabeth Gaskell by George Richmond, 1851. She looks calmly at the viewer, her smooth hair parted in the middle, with a ribbon or scarf hanging from her head and a bow at her neckline. She thought the drawing on the whole a good likeness. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Julia Wedgwood
JW was an energetic letter writer. Her letters to Emelia Russell Gurney , which cover an eleven-year span beginning in 1865, were collected by Gurney's niece in 1902. Wedgwood's sketch of Linlathen (Thomas Erskine
Textual Features George Eliot
This story is equally remarkable for the portraits of Mr Tryan (the Evangelical clergyman who not only converts Janet to his beliefs but succeeds in sparking her will to regeneration) and of Janet herself, but...
Textual Features Charlotte Brontë
The novel focuses on the Luddite riots in Yorkshire in the Napoleonic era. Shirley Keeldar, an heiress with a man's name who revels in her unconventionality (and who was, according to conversation Elizabeth Gaskell had...
Textual Features Flora Macdonald Mayor
The Rector's Daughter showcases once again FMM 's ability to make literature and her own experiences immediately relevant, as well as her outspokenness. Condensing the friction between the dying Victorian world and the modern world...
Textual Features Vera Brittain
In her Prologue, VB cited Mrs Gaskell 's Life of Charlotte Brontë as an influence. She also lamented the absence of positive representations of female friendship: I hope that Winifred's story may do something to...
Textual Features Isa Craig
IC 's article has a documentary feel typical of much social investigation literature, particularly the seamstress narrative popularized by writers such as Thomas Hood , Henry Mayhew , and Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel Ruth...
Textual Features Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
Textual Features Ella D'Arcy
A young Roman Catholic priest ministers to a tiny parish in the fictional south-coast town of Hattering. His patroness, Lady Welford, is dictatorial; his housekeeper, Mrs Lucas, is a bad cook, weakly indecisive, and sometimes...
Textual Features Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features Agnes Maule Machar
Roland Graeme, Knight incorporates wide-ranging allusions to figures such as Goethe , Dickens , Browning , Ruskin , Thoreau , Tennyson , Carlyle , and Handel . Critic Carole Gerson compares it to earlier nineteenth-century...
Textual Features Shena Mackay
The stories here deal with all kinds of complexity and nuance in the sisterly relationship. The collection ends, as the introduction begins, with Christina Rossetti 's Goblin Market. The nineteenth century is further represented...
Textual Features Isabella Banks
IB describes the same industrial, working-class Manchester that novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell and social investigators like Friedrich Engels and Dr James P. Kay-Shuttleworth had already made famous in works such as Gaskell's Mary Barton...
Textual Features Adelaide Procter
Milly's Expiation is interestingly reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell 's North and South, 1855 (to which the Athenæum compared it), and anticipatory of George Eliot 's Felix Holt, 1866. Milly is an idealised elder...
Textual Features Isabella Banks
The novel's heroine, Muriel D'Anyer, comes from the manufacturing middle class of Manchester that IB herself was born into. Muriel is educated by her energetic grandmother, Sarah Bancroft, who successfully runs the family business. In...
Textual Features Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF 's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...

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